Romney’s Advice To Students: Borrow Money From Your Parents

If you’re young and you want to start your own business, Mitt Romney’s has some advice from you: Borrow money from your parents. At a “lecture” for students at Otterbein University in Ohio today, Mitt Romney told students that, his friend, Jimmy John, started a business by borrowing $20,000 from his parents at a low interest rate. Romney suggested anyone in the audience could do the same:

This kind of devisiveness, this attack of success, is very different than what we’ve seen in our country’s history. We’ve always encouraged young people: Take a shot, go for it, take a risk, get the education, borrow money if you have to from your parents, start a business.

The advice fits right into the characterization that Romney is ‘out of touch’ with regular people. Most students don’t have parents with $20,000 in disposable capital sitting around to give to their kids to start a business.

7. That apparently worked for him...

We know thanks to Ann's telling us that while he was at BYU they lived off his 'investments' rather than some sort of student work, or outside job.

That's very interesting because it isn't at all clear how he earned the money he invested...

Born in 1947 he graduated HS in 1965. He went to Stanford, he worked as a night security guard to fund secret trips home to see Ann. In 1966 he took a draft deferrment to enter an unpaid 30 month mission for the mormons in France.

He returned from that mission started university, married his wife in 1969 and graduated college in 1971.

So, if Ann's story is true, it seems that by his 19th birthday he had acquired more than enough money for himself to live for 6 years and to support Ann for 2 years.

There is really no way he paid for the 6 years before grad school from the money saved from less than a year as a security guard!

19. Mormon missionaries paid their own way, usually from savings.

There's nothing in his bio about his working at anything in High School other than his father's campaign for governor so there isn't any evidence that he saved enough from part time work to fund his own mission.

Even if his night job as a security guard was full time, it couldn't have paid enough to live on for 6 years, two of those supporting Ann.

12. You and your buds stole ALL of our parents' nestegg, nothing left to loan.

13. It is genuinely scary that he is so clueless

that he really thinks that most parents could easily lend a kid that kind of money. It's like the casual ten thousand dollar bet offer to Rick Perry. He has no idea what ten thousand or twenty thousand dollars is to the vast middle of this country, let alone those at the bottom rungs.

He needs to be required to spend six months at a minimum wage job, and support himself on that. Find an apartment, buy food, get to and from work. No cheating. No dipping into his actual wealth. Okay, I'd let him start with five hundred bucks so tide him over before the first paycheck, even though that's more than many people have. And if he only had to do it for a few weeks or a month, I don't think it would sink in what the real world is like for so many people. No, it needs to be for six months. Which is still a lot less than the lifetime that so many endure who have nothing.